At a Glance
Power BI for Business Central is Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) tool that connects to Dynamics 365 Business Central and turns ERP data into interactive dashboards, charts, and reports. It helps teams move beyond spreadsheets by visualising KPIs, tracking trends, drilling into transactions, and combining BC data with other sources for faster, clearer decision-making. To find out if you need to integrate Power BI with your BC system, book a consultation with our team.
What is Power BI for Business Central?
If you’re a Business Central user, you know the valuable data the system holds. However, you may not have realised its complete potential yet. With limited visibility, you may still be relying on spreadsheets for financial reporting, which slows you down.
The result? The numbers can seem disconnected from reality.
The problem? Business Central holds the data, but your decision-makers need more visual insights.
The solution? Connecting Power BI to Business Central.
By connecting these two tools, you can turn raw data into interactive reports that can be embedded within the ERP.
In this guide, we’re exploring scenarios where Power BI for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central can be a valuable addition. Some of the questions we answer include: Is Power BI included with Business Central licenses? Does Business Central always need Power BI?
What Reporting Features Does Out-of-the-Box Business Central Include?
Business Central out-of-the-box offers robust core reporting features, including:
- Generate core financial statements: This includes creating balance sheets, profit and loss statements, cash flow statements, bank reconciliations, and ledger reports.
- Account Schedules: To build budget vs actual reports, KPI-style layouts, and MoM or YoY reports.
- Analysis by Dimensions: Analyse profit by business unit, team-wise expense tracking, and region-wise or service line-wise reporting.
- Basic budgeting and forecasting: Use to enter budgets, compare them, and track variances.
- Built-in Excel reporting and editing: To be exported to Excel and used for presentation.
- Audit trail: To support audit and internal reviews.
5 Areas Where Native Business Central Reporting Falls Short
Even without purchasing additional licenses, Business Central offers impressive reporting features. However, they may fall short in certain situations:
1. Limited Presentation Reporting Capabilities
While Business Central supports standard reports, the layouts are basic, often require Excel, and may not be suitable for leadership presentations.
2. No Advanced Consolidation
Native consolidation tools in BC can be more manual, harder to apply for complex business structures, and less flexible than additional consolidation tools.
3. Limited Dashboards and Visual Analytics
Out of the box, BC may lack interactive charts, dashboards, and analytics features for in-depth reporting.
4. Learning Curve of Account Schedules
While Account Schedules are powerful, they have a learning curve that users may take time to adapt to. Any mistakes in the row/column setup can lead to reporting errors.
5. Budgeting and Forecasting are not FP&A Grade
Budgeting and forecasting features in native BC are functional but fairly basic. It has limited workflow or approval structures, limited scenario modelling, and may not support rolling forecasts at scale.
Connecting Power BI to Business Central can improve reporting capabilities, helping decision-makers make informed, more confident decisions.
5 Common Scenarios Where Power BI for Business Central Adds Immediate Value
Power BI is not integrated as a native reporting tool in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, but it can offer powerful benefits when connected. In addition to Business Central’s standard reporting capabilities, integrating Power BI creates an all-in-one business management solution that helps your teams make data-driven decisions.
Using Power BI for Business Central reporting in the following scenarios can deliver remarkable value:
1. Go Beyond Standard ERP Reports
Standard Business Central offers tabular reports, but with Power BI, you get complete creative freedom. You can build customised, visually attractive reports with interactive maps, trend-tracking features, and advanced analytics charts that bring your business data to life.
Sales managers using Power BI dashboards can view regional trends over time. They can filter to a specific region and identify an area that needs additional marketing support.
2. Visualise Key Metrics in One Place
Making business intelligence a part of your daily workflow is one of the most immediate benefits of setting up Power BI with Business Central. Your finance teams can monitor cash flow, sales teams can identify opportunities, and your operations teams can watch inventory levels, all without switching between applications.
For example, finance heads can view the cash flow dashboard, which shows current inflows and outflows, and make a more informed decision about whether to buy or postpone a new equipment purchase for the quarter.
Having all key business metrics in one place can help teams make faster and better-informed decisions.
3. Enable Interactive Analytics
Power BI reports move away from regular, static reports. Their interactive features allow you to click on an element in the chart and filter the entire report, right-click for all details, and use filters to categorise data by date, category, or any other dimension. This allows your teams to get answers to questions quickly and independently without having to request reports.
4. Combine Business Central Data with Other Sources
One of the most impactful features of Power BI is its ability to pull data from Business Central and combine it with other sources.
For example, you can combine sales data in Business Central with website traffic data from Google Analytics and marketing spends from the Instagram Ads spreadsheet. You can create a holistic view of your complete sales and marketing funnel and calculate a true ROI.
5. Real-Time Financial Information
Connecting Business Central to Power BI allows you to view financial data updates as transactions happen. With regularly refreshed dashboards, decision-makers can make decisions more quickly than relying on older, static reports.
Imagine catching a vendor billing error worth thousands of pounds by spotting an anomaly on your dashboard. With monthly reporting, the damage would’ve been done long ago.
How Brookland Solutions Can Power Up Your Reporting
Integrating Power BI with Business Central makes it easier to understand your financial and operational data. This integration offers BC users up-to-date insights, visually appealing, interactive reports, and consolidated dashboards to help you make better, more informed business decisions. While Power BI offers operational benefits, setting up Power BI with Business Central can pose technical challenges without an experienced partner.
At Brookland Solutions, our specialised focus on Business Central enables us to deliver customised Power BI integrations tailored to your business and address its reporting challenges. When perfectly executed and seamlessly configured, you can view interactive reports embedded directly from Business Central from day one. We can also add extra functions and add-ons or create bespoke extensions to BC, without changing the core base code.
Integrate Power BI, the natural reporting layer for Business Central, today. Fill out the contact form to book a consultation with our team.
